Practitioner's guide to strategic green industrial policy

Any transformation of a country's industrial sectors has to be based on a holistic and coherent strategy, aimed at an overall transformation of markets and consumer behaviour by replacing resource intensive production, as well as consumption patterns with more resource efficient ones. Thus, greening will require multiple interventions to be developed and agreed upon by affected stakeholders, resulting in Strategic Green Industrial Policy (SGIP). The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) has developed this guide to provide practical advice on the evolving concept of SGIP for policy practitioners. The guide details tools that can be applied to what some industrial policymakers may consider to be relatively under-explored territory.

Indeed, some of the changes required for a transition to a green economy imply significant restructuring (if not disruption of technological paths). This guide aims to ease this transition by providing detailed guidance, also highlighting a number of changes that are relatively easy to implement. This guide thereby aims to provide decision makers with the necessary tools and information to steer through the transition, and develop a Strategic Green Industrial Policy that reflects their country's unique ecological, economic and social context as well as aspirations.

When working with this guide, policymakers can:

Browse: section by section – the main issues associated with the phases of SGIP policy development are presented in Chapter 3, with more detailed sections following in Chapter 4 and the Supplement;

Look for boxes that contain information relevant to the situation – these are presented as stand-alones whose purpose is to provide inspiration for key tasks;

Review the mindmaps for each chapter to gain a better overview of issues;

Consult the supplement to this guide for further detail on the information presented in Chapters 3 & 4.